The making of a philosopher
Ernest Hocking's early years
pp. 5-22
in: Leroy Rouner (ed), Philosophy, religion, and the coming world civilization, Berlin, Springer, 1966Abstract
It is sometimes supposed that philosophers — particularly Idealists — get their ideas by crawling into stoves or other secluded places where, after a decent interval for rapt contemplation, Insight springs full-grown from their furrowed brows. Alas, no. They are more or less like everyone else. They have childhoods, take vacations and watch television. The distinctive thing about them is not that their experience is so extraordinary, but that they get so much intellectual mileage out of it. Ernest Hocking is a good example. The recent paperback edition of The Meaning of God in Human Experience — the fourteenth printing of that great and eloquent book — reminds one again of his power to mine meaning even from the incidentals of the daily round. However, none of his books reveal the story of those formative years when his philosophy was taking shape, and the events that moulded it.
